The new tenant politics
The Week in Housing
Before diving into this week’s Newsletter, I want to let readers know about an event we are organizing at the School of Social Justice in UCD which may be of interest to anyone considering further studies or a career in the area of Social Justice. Find more and register for the event here, and please share with anyone who might be interested!
“Tenants, long a sleeping giant in American politics, are beginning to wake up. A new generation of middle-class tenants, seeing the "American Dream" of owning a house slipping away, is joining the urban poor in a growing renters' rights revolt across the country.”
These words aptly describe the politics of housing today, not just in the US, but across much of Europe as well. What is remarkable, however, is that they were written in 1986. The quote is from John Atlas and Peter Dreier’s chapter Tenants' Movement and American Politics, in the edited volume Critical Perspectives on Housing (I recently came across this book and it is well worth a read).
Atlas and Drier go on to argue that:
“Growing numbers of middle-income households, shut out of the homebuying market, are now facing the powerlessness and frustration that comes with renting. They may not have the same problems as slum dwellers-such as rats, roaches, and lead paint-but they still face many of the same problems that come with being at the mercy of landlords in a tight housing market. They face escalating rents, the constant threat of eviction, and poorly maintained buildings. Americans who were brought up with the notion that households should spend roughly one-quarter of their incomes for housing are now finding that they must spend 50 percent or more of their incomes just to keep a roof over their heads.”
It’s uncanny how closely this resembles much of the discourse around ‘generation rent’ today, and it points to the fact that many of the issues in the PRS are better seen as structural, rather than pertaining purely to the present context. Atlas and Drier’s work is also a healthy reminder not to overplay the novelty of the issues around generation rent (something I confess I am guilty of), nevertheless there is a new wave or tenant politics taking place internationally, and that is the focus of today’s Newsletter.
A month ago, I wrote about the value of a political economy approach to housing, and one of the things I emphasised was the importance of recognizing structural conflicts and antagonisms created by the housing system, and residents as agents of change within the housing system. The last decade has thrown up plenty of evidence of this, with a veritable explosion of new housing movements, generated out of the wreckage of the global financial crisis. Some of these movements have had enough impact to be reasonably well known, Berlin’s referendum on the expropriation of institutional landlord properties among them, but most of the time they have flown somewhat below the radar.
In the initial period of these new housing movements (2010-2016), academic literature was quite limited. As it happens, quite a lot of the early research came out of Ireland (see below selected bibliography). In more recent years, however, a larger body of research has emerged, particularly looking at what we might call the ‘new tenant activism’. Since 2008, many countries have experienced a rapid rise in the size of the PRS and that has been associated with a much greater incidence of issues we may once have thought were consigned to the early-20th century: rent increases, rack renting, evictions, slum landlords etc.
I recently dipped into some the literature on ‘the new tenant politics’, and this article by Kenton Card comparing tenant movements in Berlin and LA is particularly instructive. Comparing the two cities, which in principal are very different, reminds us of how widespread many of the issues around the PRS are and how housing is increasingly becoming a major political issue:
In 2019, 95% of polled Angelinos identified homelessness as the greatest threat to the city, in 2020, 81% of Angelinos said ‘protecting tenants’ is ‘extremely important’ or a ‘major’ priority for the city. In 2019, 51% of polled Berliners worried about not being able to afford rents and displacement, and in 2021, 47% of Berliners said rising rents was their biggest worry.
What is also interesting is the similar policy trajectory in both cities. In both cases, there has been a trend by Centre/Centre Right Governments at Regional/State level towards some moderate reforms of the PRS, yet, as Card argued, ‘these concessions seem to have neither slowed rising rents and the resulting precarious housing conditions, nor… quelled the growth of tenant movements’. In relation to the latter, both cities have seen an upsurge in tenant activism. According to Card, ‘tenant movements responded to inequality, leveraged negative public sentiment about that inequality for mass recruitment, and bridged between educating, providing care and support for tenants-in-crisis, and direct-action targeting landlords or state actors’.
Based on his comparative research, he identifies five key features of this new tenant politics:
(1) Making demands… that address grievances, alter the political climate, and sometimes win concessions;
(2) Forming coalitions around common goals;
(3) Promoting people’s referendums and ‘bottom-up policymaking’;
(4) Engaging government officials in dialogue, developing working relationships with elected politicians, political parties etc. to exchange ideas, broker compromise, and address policy solutions;
(5) Getting activists elected, appointed, or hired into formal government positions.
There are a couple of things that are really interesting going on here that I think are also relevant for Ireland. First is the question of ‘scale’, i.e. the city level versus higher levels of Government/politics. Card points out that:
[P]rogressive reforms have been proposed or passed at the city level (rent freeze, expropriation/eminent domain, new public housing agenda, eviction defence program), whereas moderate reforms have passed at the state and regional levels in California and Germany. The difference in outcomes across scales corresponds to differing levels of Tenant Movement Organization influence and institutional barriers at the two scales.
In other words, ‘tenant movements had less relative power at the state- and federal-levels and the reforms were more moderate, and vice versa for the city-level, suggesting the importance of understanding movements and their outcomes across jurisdictional scales’.
Ireland is, of course, a famously centralised country when it comes to Government. In particular Local Authorities have limited powers and revenue raising abilities, and the elected councillors have very little power. It strikes me that this has likely had quite a significant impact on the development (or failure to develop) of tenant politics in Ireland. We certainly have had the introduction of moderate reforms at national level (which I have written about here), but when it comes to city level there is not much going on. If Dublin City Council had the power, for example, to regulate rents or ban evictions, and if the elected representatives were in charge of these decisions, perhaps that would have created the context in which a strong tenant movement could emerge, given the high proportion of Dubliners who are renters? To put things another way, are Ireland’s centralised political institutions just incapable of giving proper political expression to specifically urban issues? (And by extension, tenants’ issues?)
Second, it is it notable here in Ireland that there is a relatively limited interaction between tenant politics and institutional politics. Although CATU have been organising on the ground around tenant issues, I seldom (if ever) hear a tenant activist in the mainstream media. When I recently took part in an Oireachtas Committee on the PRS, it was striking that there were two large teams of landlord lobbyist, and no tenant organisation. It has fallen to civil society organisations, like Threshold, and to academics, to propose policy solutions around the PRS and attempt to influence policy makers. This seems to contrast strongly with the Berlin and LA examples, where tenant activists work closely with elected reps and others involved in policy making and implementation (Barcelona is the quintessential example here: Ada Colau, now the Mayor of Barcelona, was the most prominent face of the Spanish housing movements in the years after the financial crisis).
To my mind, there are two big questions that arise from the above discussion. First, is Ireland, with its strong homeownership culture and centralised Government, incapable of generating a tenant politics that would give political representation to the more than 300,000 households who rent privately? Second, and looking at the international picture, are we witnessing the emergence of a new wave of tenant movements that will grow in strength and political relevance in the next decade? If this is the case, then we will likely see a major intensification of the already evident trend towards much greater state intervention in private rental markets. Alternatively, perhaps the ‘new tenant politics’ is a ‘flash in the pan’ which reflects the turbulence in housing systems after the GFC, but which may fizzle out over the coming years as homeownership levels stabilise, or even return to historic norms? My guess is the former is the likely scenario.
Finally, it is notable that in both LA and Berlin tenants’ movements have utilised popular referenda as a mechanism for forcing policy and political change. This strategy was also used by the PAH in Spain. Although Ireland (to my knowledge) does not have a mechanism through which citizens can petition for holding a referendum, we will have a referendum on housing at some point soon, and referenda have been one of the main ways in which progressives have achieved their political goals in recent years. In short, perhaps a referendum on housing will provide the ‘set piece’ context around which a large-scale tenants’ movement can emerge?
Events
What I’m reading
In place of the usual recommendations, here’s a selected Bibliography of Irish research on recent housing movements:
O’Callaghan, C., Di Feliciantonio, C., & Byrne, M. (2018). Governing urban vacancy in post-crash Dublin: Contested property and alternative social projects. Urban Geography, 39(6), 868-891.
Hearne, R., O’Callaghan, C., Di Feliciantonio, C., & Kitchin, R. (2018). The relational articulation of housing crisis and activism in post-crash Dublin, Ireland. Rent and its discontents: A century of housing struggle, 153-67.
Di Feliciantonio, C., & O’Callaghan, C. (2020). Struggles over property in the ‘post-political’ era: Notes on the political from Rome and Dublin. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(2), 195-213.
McArdle, R. (2022). ‘Squat City’: Dublin’s temporary autonomous zone. Considering the temporality of autonomous geographies. City, 26(4), 630-645.
McArdle, R. (2021). Tracing the role of material and immaterial infrastructures in imagining diverse urban futures: Dublin’s Bolt Hostel and Apollo House. The New Urban Ruins: Vacancy, Urban Politics and International Experiments in the Post-Crisis City, 229.
Byrne, M. (2018). Tenant Self-Organization after the Irish Crisis. Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle, 85.
Byrne, M. (2019). The political economy of the ‘residential rent relation’: antagonism and tenant organising. Radical Housing Journal